Tumblr, Famous?

 

I got on Tumblr around 2009. I had recently moved to Chicago and as a transplant, I had tons of free time in my hands and a MacBook with internet connection. That was all I needed to dive head in on Tumblr, the de rigueur app that my friends were frantically pressing me to add to the never ending stream of 'new things' they came up with every day. Tumblr came to me at a great time: I was kind of rebuilding my world and I had just left Facebook, the platform that was taking off and taking the world with it. I needed something new. Something different. And Tumblr was it.

Now, I have always kind of despised Facebook. But I have been on Facebook. I know, knowing how much I speak of the evils of that den of iniquity, you'd think I have never touched it with a ten-foot pole. But for a hot minute, I was on Facebook. I got on Facebook around 2005 or 2006 because everybody at Pitt was getting on it. Back then, you HAD to have a .edu email address to 'belong' to Facebook. It was originally intended to talk about the new undergrads and socialize at the college level, I think. I believe I was invited to Facebook by a French TA who had gotten an invite from a crazy undergrad who used to sell beer out of the trunk of his car during Frat Week. 

Facebook was the 'thing' back then. Everybody was leaving MySpace and Facebook seemed like the place to be. All my friends were there (it was a way to keep in touch with people who had just graduated and who kept their .edu email active for awhile) and it seemed like fun. There were photos of parties and hookups and brief summer romances. You were tagged on almost everything happening over the weekend and we kept it a a photo album of sorts. 

Then they let them in the high school kids and I was out. I left Facebook around spring 2008 and never looked back. I have never missed it. But Tumblr fitted right in as a replacement and I dove right in. When I signed up on Tumblr I had no idea what it was. I had blogged on Blogger for years (you know my stories about Blogger and know that I had two other blogs before I created this one) but the micro-blogging of Tumbler was innovative and fresh. You could post and reblog literally whatever you wanted: from sexy gifs to thought pieces to naked pictures of men. When it started, Tumblr was a whirlwind of ideas, and I think it gave a view to what intersectionalty would become. I literally took to it like a fish to water. 

As the site grew, it served as a wellspring for memes, web comics, and new forms of art and popular culture. GIFs emerged on Tumblr blogs as a fully realized visual language, and a cohort of “alt lit” writers, dubbed “40 Likely to Die Before 40,” started mixing online ephemera into their poetry and novels. (When the musician Frank Ocean published an open letter about his own sexuality on Tumblr in 2012, it was a global news event and an instant classic of internet literature.) Huge new online fandoms took shape too, celebrating Glee, One Direction, Marvel, and the TV show Supernatural, among other (often nerdy) pop-culture properties; they chatted in the same space where artists and photographers were coining terms for digital aesthetics. Meanwhile, all were learning a new vocabulary with which to talk about social issues. Through their interests, Tumblr users were introduced to concepts such as sex positivity, internalized misogyny, gender identity, and ableism—as well as, somewhat notoriously, trigger warnings and safe spaces. 

@kaitlintiffany

It all started with the photo of a very beautiful man. In Black and White, the man was naked and was looking straight at the camera. I don't know where I got the photo from, but I thought the man was beautiful and decided to post it. That was about eight in the morning (I've always blogged early in the morning) by noon, it had a hundred *likes*. By dinnertime, it had accumulated seven hundred. It was addictive. 

I used to blog early in the morning (back then you could post as much as you wanted, the limit of so many posts per day came later) and would do a theme, or combine political commentary with hard core pornography, M/M fanfiction (Wincest!!) and a reposted essay from Politico. Or I would post videos or music or whatever I found through other Tumblr blogs. I'd have convos with strangers and would get in arguments about sex, religion and politics. My 'wall' was always full of anything and everything that interested me and that would change from day to day. And people would stop by all day long. It was exhilarating. Because my Tumblr published a ton of porn and erotica, my Ask box was always full of dick pics and naked pictures of men who were more than willing to let the world see their beauty. 

But it would not last: 

In December 2018, under D’Onofrio’s leadership, the platform announced that it would no longer allow NSFW content, including images of “female-presenting nipples.” Tumblr users, protective of the site’s long history as a home for sexual exploration, reacted with horror—even before it became clear that the jarring change would be implemented with little care or sensitivity. A mass exodus ensued: In the year after the announcement, traffic plummeted. “The nail in the coffin was the porn ban,” a former Tumblr employee who left the company in 2021 told me. (They agreed to speak with me anonymously, out of concern for their professional relationships.) “That was a fiasco. It really hurt the community a lot. It sent users off in droves and they took their followers with them. We just never recovered from that.”

@kaitlintiffany

Tumblr was sold to Yahoo! for one cool billion and Yahoo! Brought D'Onofrio, who tried to homogenize it, commercialize it and make it a version of Instagram (which Facebook had just recently bought). So I was out. My Tumblr was literally crawling with photos of dressed, naked and half-naked men, so the bots started taking down posts and censoring all my content. At the end of the day, I was a porn curator: most of my content was dedicated to the male form, LGBTQ topics, porn stars and all kinds of homoerotica. Smut was my daily bread. I also posted about politics and a ton about religion (I don't do that anymore, I wonder why?) and race and gender studies. By the time I quit Tumblr I had several thousand followers (probably Huntley remembers how many?) and a very active online presence but I was not going to be muzzled by a corporation. You could have said I was 'Tumblr Famous' and brought a lot of boys to the yard. Tumblr did give me good times, don't get me wrong. I made many friends who have lasted to this day and got into arguments about race and sexuality with many a troll and learned a lot about social justice and politics from other Tumblrs. I also gained Huntley: in a dare from another Tumblr I had created a Grindr profile and that's how we met.

So that's my story with Tumblr. A website that would, at its heyday, be worth more than one billion dollars. Now, thanks to that porn ban, greed and utter mismanagement, it is on the brink of nothingness. There you go, Verizon! Sad, I know. We did have a good time, Tumblr. But it was your time to go. D'onofrio is now out of Tumblr and his ideals are no longer valid. The notion that the giant Id/Ego that was Tumblr could be tamed and deprived of its core was misguided and an absolute failure. No matter how much you want to tame sex and everything related to it, it will forever be a force few can erase. The desire to sterilize Tumblr led to its demise. They were trying to make money and to make money they needed to get rid of the queer creators, the free thinkers, the sex workers and the people that had literally made Tumblr what it was. They ended up with the QAnon sympathizers, the Russian bots and the Karens that now threaten to drown Facebook. At the end, fifteen years later, WordPress has apparently bought Tumblr for three million. The tumble was big.

You can still find pieces of me on Tumblr, though.  #sugaronastick is still searchable because even though my Tumblr is gone, I still posted many things that were not smutty and they stayed online after being reblogged by others. But there's no going back for me. I like Blogger, with all the stupid trolls and its clunky interface. Blogger made me go back to longform blogging, which concurrently, serves as catharsis. I still post smut and I still rant and rave about anything and everything and keep my stream of consciousness in the TMI setting. But I like it. And I like my little tribe here on Blogger. I like you, Constant Reader, who reads my rants and my raves and who puts up with too many dick pics. 

So thank you for stopping by. I had the inkling you would.

XOXO

P.S. I found that banner in a forgotten folder in my photos. It was the banner I used on Tumblr. I was told I should preserve my Tumblr before the fall, but I never did.